Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.”

— George Orwell

302. “The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.”

— George Orwell

303. “It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”

— George Orwell

304. “The prime necessities for success in life are money, athleticism, tailor made clothes and a charming smile.”

— George Orwell

305. “Some things ARE true, even though the party says they are true.”

— George Orwell

306. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

— George Orwell

307. “Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state – however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor.”

— George Orwell

308. “Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.”

— George Orwell

309. “Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.”

— George Orwell

310. “They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.”

— George Orwell

311. “He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

— George Orwell

312. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.”

— George Orwell

313. “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

— George Orwell

314. “The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.”

— George Orwell

315. “The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”

— George Orwell

316. “The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.”

— George Orwell

317. “We make you pay for the water you drink, for the food you eat, for the wars we need, for the crimes we commit. We make you dedicate the most important part of your life to us, but we give you wages and tell you they allow you to buy stuff and pay for your needs to make us richer. We call this freedom.”

— George Orwell

318. “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

— George Orwell

319. “Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.”

— George Orwell

320. “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.”

— George Orwell

321. “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

— George Orwell

322. “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

— George Orwell

323. “Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends what trees and what men.”

— George Orwell

324. “Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.”

— George Orwell

325. “All nationalistic distinctions – all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect – are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.”

— George Orwell

326. “Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken well and spread my tidings Of the golden future time.”

— George Orwell

327. “We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.”

— George Orwell

328. “Writing a novel is agony.”

— George Orwell

329. “Four legs good, two legs bad.’ This, he said, contained the essential principle of Animalism.”

— George Orwell

330. “The other animals understood how to vote, but could never think of any resolutions of their own.”

— George Orwell

331. “The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.”

— George Orwell

332. “One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.”

— George Orwell

333. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.”

— George Orwell

334. “He said that the education of the young was more important than anything that could be done for those who are already grown up.”

— George Orwell

335. “I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?”

— George Orwell

336. “After 40, a man is responsible for his face.”

— George Orwell

337. “It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.”

— George Orwell

338. “He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.”

— George Orwell

339. “Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?”

— George Orwell

340. “There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word – Man.”

— George Orwell

341. “A peace that is truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.”

— George Orwell

342. “Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, ‘mass sadism’, the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs.”

— George Orwell

343. “The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.”

— George Orwell

344. “Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.”

— George Orwell

345. “On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

— George Orwell

346. “When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don’t have to ask whose side I’m on.”

— George Orwell

347. “The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.”

— George Orwell

348. “Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy.”

— George Orwell

349. “Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

— George Orwell

350. “In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.”

— George Orwell